Boston Early Music Festival strikes again with a knockout Octavia

Reinhard Keiser’s 1705 Octavia (or to give it its full title, The Roman Rebellion or the Noble-Minded Octavia) is the fifth Hamburg opera to open the biennial Boston Early Music Festival since 2003. So the peculiarities of the Gänsemarkt Theater operas – many dictated by the fact that it was the first public opera house in Germany – should by now be familiar to frequent festival-goers. Kaiser's librettist Barthold Fein introduced some refinements, the sidelining of the stock comic character being the most noteworthy. He also created a densely eventful drama by conflating distant historical events into a fictional timeline which could accommodate the requisite, but ahistorical, happy ending. The juxtaposition of the private concerns of the characters with the public grandeur and spectacle of Imperial Rome encapsulated the festival’s theme of “Love and Power” and endowed the action with unusual psychological and emotional depth as affairs of state and affairs of the heart (and quadrants further south) intertwined.

Musically, Keiser continued an innovation he introduced in 1703 and which would become another Hamburg hallmark: arias in Italian, and made masterful use of long declamatory passages, later known as recitativo accompagnato. Declamation achieves its greatest dramatic effect during Nero’s tour de force in Act 3. Hiding after Piso’s revolt, chastened and haunted by his past transgressions, the tortured emperor wrestles with his fate. From the outset, bass-baritone Douglas Ray Williams had used a precise physicality and supple vocalism to limn his Nero, a willful, unstable, preening, man-child barely able to sit still to listen to Seneca’s counsel or concentrate on the consequences of indulging his impulses. Black shadow rimmed his eyes, reducing them to feral slits flashing with a manic energy. Act 3 found him humbled and subdued, his eyes now wide open and underlined in red. Williams, earning Nero’s redemption, created sympathy for one of history’s least sympathetic characters. When he appeared for the final scene, he was clear-eyed, composed and contrite.

Octavia, a vision in white, was virtue and nobility personified, but far from pallid in character. The steel and fiery conviction with which Emőke Baráth imbued her portrayal animated Octavia in a powerful way, aided by a voice which has gained in weight and depth since her last appearance here, while remaining warm and pliant. Amanda Forsythe’s Ormoena, a woman of high spirits who triggers Nero’s lust setting the plot in motion, was genuinely torn between the prospect of becoming Rome’s empress and remaining faithful to her husband. Like others in the cast she was adept at inflecting embellishments for dramatic or comic effect. 

Two other couples, Lepidus (Jason McStoots, stolid in his courtship) and Clelia (Sherezade Panthaki, bringing comic flair to a mischievous spitfire) and Livia (Hannah De Priest, ostensibly boy crazy but clearly drawn to Fabius) and Fabius (Richard Pittsinger, persistent and sincere but befuddled by Livia’s reluctance), charted a more flirtatious, initially unrequited course towards love. Only Aaron Sheehan’s passionate Piso, who pines for freedom almost as much as for Octavia, remains alone at the end, though he has Rome reborn and his life as consolation.

Some of the Hamburg operas lasted nearly six hours, primarily due to the challenges of multiple scene changes. Gilbert Blin's staging, with Alexander McCargar’s Baroque-inspired painted drops and shutters, provided for not only sumptuous visual variety but rapid scene changes which made the 3+ hour runtime feel like half that. The BEMF Orchestra, led by concertmaster Robert Mealy, contributed to that feeling with a lithe, rhythmically sharp performance. One of Keiser’s innovations was the use of two natural horns, according to the program notes their first appearance in an opera. Todd Williams and Nathanael Udell made this fiendishly difficult instrument sound easy.

Once again, the BEMF has brought a Baroque opera back to life, exceptionally well sung, adroitly staged, designed and danced, with impeccable musicianship. Though much scholarship goes into these productions, they are never dry intellectual exercises. Historically informed? Yes, but with production values which give the 18th century a voice which can speak to the 21st.